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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

According to the official status page, the whole datacenter is still green http://status.ovh.com/vms/index_sbg2.html

I feel like there should be place to report infrastructure suppliers with misleading status pages, some kind of crowdsourced database. Without this information, you only find out that they are misleading when something goes very wrong.

At best you might be missing out on some SLA refunds, but at worst it could be disasterous for a business. I've been on the wrong side of a update-by-hand status system from a hosting provider before and it wasn't fun.

https://downdetector.fr/

Thanks, can't belive it's taken me 8 years to learn about that.

Wtf is this disclaimer on Down Detector for? (Navigate to OVH page.). It sits in front of user comments, I think:

> Unable to display this content to due missing consent. By law, we are required to ask your consent to show the content that is normally displayed here.

It's a Disqus widget. If you denied consent for third party tracking, they can't load it.

I've usually seen this with embedded videos rather than comments.

Who monitors the monitors?

Agreed, though. A fake status page is worse than no status page. I don't mind if the status page states that it's manually updated every few hours as long as it's honest. But don't make it look like it's automated when it's not.

Would a blatantly false status page meet the criteria for false advertising?

My gut says yes.

Also, 3 years ago they had an outage in Strasbourg, and the status page was down apparently as a result of the outage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661218

They are not the only ones though. All too common. Well, it's tricky to set this up properly. The only proper way would be to use external infra for the status page.

Isn’t that why things like statuspage.io exist, though?

Where is statuspage.io hosted?

In the cloud of course. Why do you ask?

I work for a CDN, and we had to change our status page provider once when they became our customer.

It's not difficult to make a status page with minimal false negatives. Throw up a server on another host that shows red when it doesn't get a heartbeat. But then instead you end up with false positives. And people will use false positives against you to claim refunds against your SLA.

So nobody chooses to make an honest status page.

Yep. I guess what could be done is a two-tiered status page: automated health check which shows "possible outage, we're investigating" and then a manual update (although some would say it looks lame to say "nah, false positive" which is probably why this setup is rare).

As someone who maintained a status page (poorly), I'm sorry on behalf of all status pages.

But, they're usually manual affairs because sometimes the system is broken even when the healthcheck looks ok, and sometimes writing the healthcheck is tricky, and always you want the status page disconnected from the rest of the system as much as possible.

It is a challenge to get 'update the status page' into the runbook. Especially for runbooks you don't review often (like the one for the building is on fire, probably).

Luckily my status page was not quite public; we could show a note when people were trying to write a customer service email in the app; if you forget to update that, you get more email, but nobody posts the system is down and the status page says everything is ok.

You're completely right. IMO this is the best comment in this whole thread. Their status page must be broken, or it's a lie.

If there is a SLA with consequences associated with it every status page is going to be a lie.

Well, it sucks to catch fire and I care for the employees and the firemen, but if their status page is a lie then I have a whole lot less sympathy for the business. That's shady business and they should feel bad.

I can appreciate an honest mistake though, like the status page server cron is hosted in the same cluster that caught fire and hence it burnt down and can't update the page anymore.

Is the status page relevant though? At the very least, OVH immediately made a status announcement on their support page and they've been active on Twitter. I don't see anything shady here. From their support page:

> The whole site has been isolated, which impacts all our services on SBG1, SBG2, SBG3 and SBG4. If your production is in Strasbourg, we recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan

What more could you want?

> Is the status page relevant though?

What's the point of a status page then if it does not show you the status? I don't want to be chasing down twitter handles and support pages during an outage.

Still better than Amazon where their status page describes little and fat chance of anyone official sharing anything on social media either.

I wonder if a server fire would cause Amazon to go to status red. So far anything and everything has fallen under yellow.

To have a status page that reflects actual statuses? To know that I'm not being lied to or taken advantage of? To know that my SLA is being honored?

lol... that’s how most status pages are

The weather map is interesting: http://weathermap.ovh.net/

No traffic whatsoever between sbg-g1 and sbg-g2 ant their peers.

It seems to be a static site, which seems reasonable since it aggregates a lot of data and might encounter high load when something goes wrong, so generating it live without caching is not viable. So maybe the server that normally updates it is down too (not that this would be a good excuse)?

10+ hours cache on a status page doesn't look like real-time monitoring to me.

I think this is probably linked to a manual reporting system and they got bigger fish to fry at the moment than updating this status page.

Counterpoint: There's a constantly updating timestamp at the top of the page that suggests it's automated and real time.

> Legend: Servers down: 0 1+ 4+ 6+ 8+ 10+ 15+

If they don't have any servers anymore, how can they be down ;)

https://archive.is/LOHVS

http://web.archive.org/web/20210310100021/http://status.ovh....

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/2rpWv0P.png

Noticed the same this morning, but note they took the link out of the main page (of SBG2 and 3): https://www.ovh.com/world/community/status/

Probably the best they could do at the moment.

Four hours later still green.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com